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Joined 7 years ago
Joined 7 years ago
That latter thing might be the biggest issue. The basic assumptions seems to be that things always come easy for men and they are always welcome.
And yes I know many women in tech, as I studied with them and worked with them.
I have also seen many articles by women in tech who say they didn't have issues. But somehow they don't count and are quickly forgotten, because they go against the narrative.
Would you also say Steve Jobs was merely lucky, and everybody else could have founded Apple? Perhaps people just don't know enough about what those CEOs do?
And of course at a basic level, it is always luck, because even being born, being healthy, the place where you are born, intelligence, and so on, are luck.
I think to assume people don't deserve stuff because they were lucky is rather backwards.
Imagine you had a brain tumor, and you need brain surgery. There is a surgeon who was very lucky - he was born white, male, to a wealthy family, so that he could afford to go to the best schools to become a really good brain surgeon.
Would you then say that guy doesn't deserve your money, because he was just lucky?`
I'd say that's just bullshit. It doesn't matter why or how he got his qualifications by luck, magic, whatever. What matters right now, what makes you willing to give him money, is that he can provide you with the best odds of a successful brain surgery.
You are welcome to pick a random poor person from the street to perform that surgery, for the sake of fairness. After all, it isn't their fault that they weren't able to afford the education to become a brain surgeon, right?
And if you say that brain surgeon should have to operate on you for free, that is exploitation, plain and simple. You dispose of his body. In the end he would be punished for becoming a brain surgeon, because people would feel entitled to his services and would make him work 20 hours a day, with no compensation.
You were so close to getting it, what happened to you?"
There is a difference between limiting how rich anybody can get, and taking everything away from families if the head of family dies.
"Hey, person who can barely make it to get by and spends all of their income on subsistence-level living, why don't you just get more capital?"
How many such people even exist? If you barely make it, you should aim to improve your situation. Try to find a better job, try to learn skills that enable you to get a better job, and so on. Few people are really doomed to such a situation forever. And those who are, usually because of illness, need charitable help or insurance. It's a separate problem.
"everyone should be given a fair chance to make it--but what is fair, how is this decided, who enforces it?"
Well who do you want to decide what is fair?
I think markets are the best mechanism to establish fair prices. Other than that, you can establish some baseline - access to housing, food and education, so that people can try to make something out of their lives. It can be discussed. But certainly it doesn't mean fair has to be everybody has to have the exact same starting positions. It is not even possible, because not all parents are the same. If your parent is Paul Graham and he teaches you programming, you already have an advantage against other kids, even without economic resources.
"So it's perfectly acceptable when Coca Cola sends death squads to kill labor organizers."
Obviously not. I think you are being silly here. Basic laws still apply.
Sorry for the harsh formulation, but the point is, we really don't actually know what is going on. It is not legitimate to just assume women are being pushed away from traditional career paths in IT.
As for Military, I think the idea to become a Software Developer is by now a very common one, you don't have to come from a specific demographic to have heard of that option. Women come from the same backgrounds as men, the odds to have a baby girl or a baby boy are the same at all levels of society.
Most people don't even try, but it doesn't stop them from accusing people who put in the work and who take the risks from just being lucky.
Well, again, start accumulating capital, if it is such an unfair advantage.
"I, too, am in favor of a 100% wealth tax upon death. No more freeloading failsons."
I am absolute against such a thing, in fact I consider it an insane proposal.
It seems one of the fundamental human rights should be people being allowed to provide for their children.
People work to have successful children. It is absolutely incorrect that all children should have the same starting positions for a fair world. If a couple works hard to earn money, and others don't work and instead pop out 10 children, why on earth would it be fair to take money from the hard working parents to distribute it to all? I know many people who would like to have more children, but feel they can't afford them. Why should they be punished for being responsible.
It even starts before people have children. They work hard to be attractive and find a good mate, to improve the odds for their children. That is basic human nature.
The acts of their parents are not the children's fault, of course, and everybody should be given a fair chance to make it in life. But there are limits. Both strategies can be valid (have few children and try to give them a good head start in live vs having as many children as possible and leaving them to their own devices), but it would be unfair to politically punish one strategy over the other. At the very least, if you take away money from the responsible parents, you should have to limit the behavior of the irresponsible parents.
The only way to make things completely equal for everyone is to disallow people to have children, and instead rise future children in clone factories. Why should that be considered desirable?
And even more basic than that: people should be allowed to do with their money as they please. Including giving it to their children.
Yes, lots of people were alive in the exact same time when he started Amazon.
People starving, having no health care, low life expectancy, that sort of thing, are problems. Their neighbor having more money in the bank is not really a problem.
There are also actually differences in skills, performance, diligence, and so on. It would be very unfair if some people weren't allowed to earn more money than others.
Whether it should be possible to be arbitrarily rich is another question.
Start with basics. People live in the woods, with nothing. Some start building a hut from sticks, others don't. The ones living in huts suddenly are richer than the ones who don't, even though they haven't taken anything away from the ones who don't have huts.
And of the ones who don't have huts demand some of the huts from the people who built them, who is doing the exploiting?
Go visit a medieval castle sometime. The standards that now everybody has required an army of servants in the old days.
It is just a hateful lie of the left to claim "being rich" is dependent on exploiting poor people.
For what it's worth, many of the accounts of "bad experiences" didn't really convince me, either. It is too easy to attribute all of one's issues to sexism. For example the common complaint of being passed over in promotions, or of having one's opinions not being appreciated. That happens to men all the time, too, they just don't get to claim it is because of sexism.
Confirmation bias may play a huge role in those personal accounts, too.
As I said - usually the comparison to actual experiences of men is missing. There are many, many more men who have been passed over for promotion than women who have been passed over, in the tech industry, for example.
Another thing that is missing is an account of the advantages women have, like men being eager to help, extra funding only for women, hiring quotas, and so on.